We sat in a stupor as Boris shut us down – but now get into a frenzy about a party
WHY do so many of you always get angry about the wrong thing at the wrong time? How ridiculous it is to watch the nation in a frenzy about an office party, when it sat in dumb stupor through the greatest attack on its freedom in centuries.
Look, it is not the parties that matter. What mattered was that you were unjustly and mistakenly ordered to endure absurd limits on your life, by a government that panicked. And you did as you were told. I am genuinely unsure what kind of men and women they were who actually denied people contact with their dying relatives. Could you do that?
But such behaviour, like the forcible separation of families at funerals and all the other hysterical rubbish of the Covid crackdown, should have been howled down. We all, in our lives, know the real and proper limits of power and authority. We know what we can reasonably ask of others – and what we cannot.
But when the Johnson Government came to us in March 2020, ordering us to stay at home and telling us to behave as if the Great Plague was loose in our midst, when it so plainly was not, that was the time to be angry. But mostly, you were not. I still cherish the support I received at that time from the small minority who could see that the Johnson response to Covid was hysterical and wildly out of proportion to the danger.
I will be grateful for it as long as I live. But I also remember with bitterness the spiteful insults and the naked censorship that were turned on me and on the few others who argued that we were making a terrible mistake.
MISSING in action were almost all the Members of Parliament who had been elected to preserve our constitution and liberties. Busy on the side of folly was Her Majesty’s Opposition, an army of uselessness which collapsed uncritically into support for measures not previously seen outside Communist China.
By the way, do you really think that these people would not have held any secret office parties if they had been in power? Really? Is mature common sense the thing that divides the big parties from each other?
I wonder what a searching investigation of the private behaviour of all senior Labour figures during the panic period might find. Luckily for them, they have no Dominic Cummings to tell the world. The truth is, our political elite of all parties never believed their own Covid propaganda. But they have greatly enjoyed the increased power it has given them and they are reluctant ever to give it up. So they must pretend to believe it.
Heaven knows I am no supporter
or defender of Johnson. Even on his own terms, his behaviour has been dismal. I think he betrayed everything he supposedly stood for when he closed the country that evening nearly two years ago. He listened to the wrong experts and allowed the promotion of a terrible exaggerated fear, which has permanently
ruined many lives and which he still has not managed to disperse. But I do wonder why he is now in such trouble, just after he had begun to show signs of regaining his reason.
Finally, just before Christmas, he began to question the diet of panic and restriction pressed on him by
his advisers. We were spared the shutdown they wanted and he turned out to be right. Omicron was not the horror that the fear factories of Whitehall said it would be.
And it is at this point that the nation descends into a frenzy about some parties in Downing Street. Well, I have always been a great
believer in coincidence theory. And this is quite a coincidence. But, honestly, the time for outrage was long ago. Now we should be trying to get out of this mess before it bankrupts any more businesses, destroys any more lives and wrecks any more educations. Do you think Sir Keir Starmer is the man to do that?